‘We are never neither really someone else, nor really the same person.’

– Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, 1989.

IN ANDRÉ BRETON’S NOVEL Nadja, first published in 1928, the author describes an unconventional woman who embodies the principles behind Surrealist art: a ‘disinterested play of thought’, the practice of ‘psychic automatism’ and the search for the ‘marvelous’ in everyday life.¹ Italian-born French couturière Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) was a real-life Nadja who incarnated these ideals in an ambiguous way. Like the persona of Paul Poiret, hers too was built around her status as an artist rather than a dressmaker. Ironically, this promotional strategy was achieved through refined commercial acumen: by associating themselves with art rather than business they imbued their work with a magical aura that became key to their commercial success. The designer’s autobiography, Shocking Life (1954), wove together her personal and professional contradictions and secured a legacy after her maison had ceased to exist.

A recurring theme in the text and in her work is that of metamorphosis. In the book, Schiaparelli employed rhetoric strategies to shape the narrator as an ever-changing self, impossible to pin down. As in her designs, where she subverted taste and functionality of a garment – an insect became a button, a shoe inspired a hat, a trompe l’œil effect turned a jumper into a shirt. A key word in the Surrealist vocabulary, metamorphosis bears strong associations with transformation, mystique, and duality. In this way, Schiaparelli’s autobiography is a literal mirror to the Surrealist themes in her dress designs, navigating the blurred lines between art and fashion, history and fantasy, political engagement and studied indifference in the construction of her public persona.

The title Shocking Life alone suggests multiple readings. ‘Shocking’ refers to her life, one of excitement, privilege and excess; it also references ‘Shocking Pink’, the colour she created, which acts as a synecdoche for her provocative designs; finally, it underscores her commercial success by echoing the name of the fragrance she launched in 1937. But as critic Judith Thurman observes, ‘what is most shocking about Schiaparelli […] is her obscurity.’²

The obscurity that Thurman pinpointed is the key feature of Schiaparelli’s protean and self-constructed persona in Shocking Life. Throughout the book, the designer alternatively refers to herself as ‘I’, ‘she’ and ‘Schiap’. In the foreword her personality is presented as inherently contradictory: ‘She is unpredictable but, in reality, disarmingly simple. She is profoundly lazy but works furiously and rapidly […] She is generous and mean […] she both despises and loves human beings […] If she is charming she can also be the most hateful person in the world.’ The effect is a constant mirroring of fragments of her own persona, which makes it difficult for the reader to see beyond the theatricality of rhetoric. While personal and historical accounts abound, the misadventures, the travels, the economic success, the troubled family life and the observations on World War II seem to follow one another for the sake of spectacle rather than reflection, to dazzle readers rather than draw them in. Schiaparelli’s technique follows the refusal of logic, rationality, clarity and order advocated by Bréton in his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, a text that was in turn influenced by Freud’s studies on dreams and the unconscious. Schiaparelli’s focus in the text is the surface: of the events, of her self, of her persona.

Much like Paul Poiret, Schiaparelli resorts to the romantic myth of the misunderstood artist. She describes her youth as a constant struggle against the expectations of her family; she was ‘revolutionary and stubborn’, ‘far too imaginative’ and ‘ultra-sensitive’, looking for a creative outlet to express herself. Her view of fashion is summarised in the following passage:

‘Dress designing, incidentally, is to me not a profession but an art. I found that it was the most difficult and unsatisfying art, because as soon as a dress is born it has already become a thing of the past […] The interpretation of a dress, the means of making it, and the surprising way in which some materials react – all these factors, no matter how good an interpreter you have, invariably reserve a slight if not bitter disappointment for you. In a way it is even worse if you are satisfied, because once you have created it the dress no longer belongs to you. A dress cannot just hang like a painting on the wall, or like a book remain intact and live a long and sheltered life.’

Schiaparelli expresses dissatisfaction with the commercial nature of fashion while also drawing from Surrealist rhetoric to describe to her creative process as ‘a dream’. The issues of originality, fantasy, and authorship that emerge echo depictions of fashion, femininity and sewing machines in Surrealism at large. Her use of terms from the artistic discourse, with which she was intimately familiar, also elevated the credibility of her persona and added an aura of exclusivity to her brand. The Surrealist fascination with everyday objects and articulation of the self as unstable or ‘decentered’³ meant that fashion became an important site for the exploration of identity. Many Surrealists gravitated around fashion working as photographers, illustrators and designers, and did in fact embrace its commercial nature. Rather than to prove herself to them, however, Schiaparelli had to prove herself to mass audiences, which generally considered art and fashion as very distinct realms.

In reality, Schiaparelli engaged with the commercial nature of fashion just as well as her rival Coco Chanel, who famously dismissed her as ‘that Italian artist who makes clothes’. Not only did she promote her ‘hard chic’ silhouette to the masses by associating her brand with Hollywood darlings like Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn, but she was the first designer to lend her creations out as a promotional strategy to often photographed Parisian women such as French actress Arletty and socialite Reginald Fellowes.

Schiaparelli’s business acumen was confirmed by the launch of her fragrance Shocking, whose bottle was designed after the body shape of Mae West, then one of the most celebrated Hollywood actresses. As fashion historian Colin McDowell observes, her maison was financially secure thanks to the licensing of nail varnish, underwear and menswear, but also less fashionable goods such as mattresses and shower curtains.⁵

Omissions abound in Schiaparelli’s autobiography, where silences matter as much as her dramatic stories. The designer glosses over her controversial political connections during World War II and constantly downplays the role of her less-than-glamorous business endeavours. It is the space between what is said and unsaid that allows her to craft a mythical persona. Like Nadja, who seeks to crash bourgeois values through her clothing and embodies Breton’s view of irrationality as the essence of femininity, Schiaparelli thrived on contradiction; her public persona offered her a consistent strategy to avoid the implications of her incongruence.

Alex Esculapio is a writer and PhD student at the University of Brighton, UK.

1. A. Bréton, The Manifestoes of Surrealism, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1972. ↩

2. J. Thurman, “Mother of Invention,” The New Yorker, 27 October 2003, p.58. ↩

3. C. Evans, “Masks, Mirrors and Mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and the Decentered Subject”, Fashion Theory, Volume 3, Issue 1, 1999, pp. 3-32 ↩

4. R. Martin, Fashion and Surrealism, New York, Rizzoli, 1987. ↩

5. http://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/education/elsa-schiaparelli-1890-1973. ↩

There are, of course, differences. Walter Benjamin likened photography to a violin, a musical instrument; the art was in the playing of it, not in the instrument itself. Similarly, Susan Sontag¹ suggested that photography was a language, and, like language, it was not an art in itself, but rather the process from which art might emerge. Photography was born as an industrial process, the salient feature of which is the mass reproducibility of the image. Fashionable dress was originally artisanal; however it too has been wholly incorporated into and transformed by mass production. In addition, fashion styles today are disseminated globally by means of the reproducible image, so that quite aside from the characteristics they share, fashion and photography are economically entwined. This economic symbiosis has a further dimension in that both mass fashion and the mass image have aestheticised the world – or at least large parts of the globe – massively contributing to the visual culture in which we now live.

A further similarity between fashion and photography is that in contemporary society both function as potent visual representations of history, of the past. This does not just mean in terms of images in the press and other mass media; the rise of mass photography has meant that amateur photography – the snapshot – has become a major bearer of personal memories, just as images in the mass media become the archives of public memory.

My interest is not in discussing the status of these two forms, fashion and photography, and whether they qualify as art, or not. That debate tends to rely, at least to some extent, on an idea of Art with a capital ‘A’. Art with a capital A disavows vulgar commerce, claiming to be driven by individual genius, when in fact the art market is as much a market as anything else. By contrast, the obvious relationship of both fashion and photography to consumer capitalism is one reason why many commentators and critics have wanted to deny them a place in the Art pantheon. Walter Benjamin quotes from a nineteenth century German newspaper to illustrate the philistinism of the conventional view of art, with its romantic conception of genius – to which we still, rather surprisingly, cling to today. The article from which he quotes is an attack on photography: ‘to try to capture fleeting mirror images … is blasphemous. Man is made in the image of God, and God’s image cannot be captured by any machine of human devising. The utmost the artist may venture, borne on the wings of divine inspiration, is to reproduce man’s God-given features without the help of any machine, in the moment of highest dedication, at the higher bidding of his genius.’² The intervention of an industrial, mechanical process negated the possibility that an aesthetic product could be ‘Art’.

And in one way or another, for the bourgeois romantic, Art was in some sense sacred. It was difficult to fit fashion into this category; its relationship to the body and its association with novelty and change at a time when Art was held to express the eternal, disqualified it.

The originality of the great theorists of modernity, Baudelaire and Benjamin, lies in part in their challenge to this view of art, and their understanding that modernity changes art. Photography and fashion were for them portals through which they approached this understanding. Baudelaire wrote of finding the eternal in the ephemeral as well as of how modern fashion expresses the beauty of its epoch, but the radicalism of this insight did not succeed in freeing fashion from the taint of mutability. Fashion could never, it was assumed, express a universal truth. It was always a sort of meretricious gloss on modern life and for moralists a kind of lie, concealing the underlying ugliness of consumer capitalism, not to mention the sinfulness of the human body. Thorstein Veblen’s is the best known, and still widely revered, statement of this position. Couturiers, nevertheless, claimed and continued to claim that they are artists, driven by inspiration and genius. Charles Frederick Worth even wore a Rembrandt-style beret to prove that he was such an artist.

By contrast, photography did seem to be the bearer of truth. The camera cannot lie. We now know this is not true. Even before the advent of digital photography and the computer, which bring endless possibilities of altering the raw image, it had been realised that every photograph is taken by an individual who brings his own bias and evaluation to the construction of the image. Nevertheless, photography continues to benefit from the idea that it bears witness, that it is objective. At the same time this supposed documentary objectivity distinguishes it from Art. It is, as it were, visual journalism rather than visual literature.

Photography nevertheless became an important dimension of modernism. Susan Sontag describes the process in this way: ‘Everyday life apotheosised, and the kind of beauty that only the camera reveals – a corner of material reality that the eye doesn’t see… or can’t normally isolate… when ordinary seeing was… violated – and the object isolated from its surroundings, rendering it abstract – new conventions about what was beautiful took hold. What is beautiful became just what the eye can’t (or doesn’t) see: that fracturing, dislocating vision that only the camera supplies.’³ In other words she implies that photography paves the way for abstract art, rather than abstract art being a reaction to the objective realism of the photograph.

It was just this kind of arty photography that Benjamin disliked. He writes: ‘The more far-reaching the crisis of the present social order… the more has the creative – in its deepest essence a sport, by contradiction out of imitation – become a fetish, whose lineaments live only in the fitful illumination of changing fashion. The creative in photography is its capitulation to fashion. The world is beautiful – that is its watchword. Therein is unmasked the posture of a photography that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connexions in which it exists.’⁴ Benjamin – here anticipating Warhol in the most uncanny way – rejects the ideology of Art for Art’s Sake, as would any good Marxist of his time. But the kind of photography that is closest to painting does lose some of the distinctiveness and disavows some of the other possibilities of photography. To think of photographs in some abstract sense as Art also tends to distance both from the realm of the Everyday; when it is as reminders and memorials of the everyday that their hold is so potent.

Fashion, for all its hype, is also quintessentially about the everyday; everyday life. Clothes are what we put on every day; even those who most strenuously insist that what they wear has nothing to do with fashion and that they are not interested in fashion, are nevertheless wearing clothes as directed by fashion in one way or another. Fifty years ago no-one wore jeans to the office or to a party; men (let alone women) did not wear shorts in town. The casualisation of dress, which has made it possible for many individuals to feel that they have opted out of fashion, is in fact a fashion in itself, even were it not that the jeans we wear today are subtly different from those of ten or twenty or fifty years ago; as are t-shirts – and again, fifty years ago no-one wore a vest, that is to say an undergarment, to work.

For Sontag, ‘photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still.’⁵ Photographs preserve the past. This insight echoes those of Benjamin and Roland Barthes, the latter in particular insisting obsessively on the mournful nature of photographs which present us with the past without enabling us to re-enter it.

This might seem to separate photography radically from fashion. We choose the clothes we wear every day in order to look right now – today. In that sense fashion is very much about the present. It is about fitting in, while, perhaps, remaining distinctive. It’s to create an impression and to persuade others that this is who we are, this is what we are like. In that sense the everyday practice of fashion has nothing to do with the past or with memory. In fact, the wish is to efface the past, to erase any memory of our having been other than what we are or how we wish to appear today.

Fashion photography is rather different from some other kinds of photography, since it essentially makes images of this eternal present. In the early and mid twentieth century fashion illustration, whether drawing or photography, aimed to be more informational than is the case today. Fashion photography today aims to create an ambience; at least in the upmarket fashion magazines and equally in broadsheet newspapers, there is very little information in that it is often difficult to see exactly what the garment looks like; instead there is a photographic creation of a mood – floaty summer dresses worn by a model whose curled up position set against a woodland scene is purely atmospheric. Fashion photography today is indeed as Carol Tulloch wrote ‘a legitimate if contentious art form’.⁶ Fashion photographers such as Corinne Day and Juergen Teller or the ‘heroin chic’ spreads of the 1990s have aimed to extend their art beyond the narrow perimeters of the garment itself to address, however superficially, social concerns. Theirs is thus a creative and engaged form. But although Paul Jobling,⁷ among others, has made a strong case for the importance of this kind of fashion photography, and although it would probably misunderstand the whole enterprise to reject Juergen Teller and others for reducing drug addiction to the glamorous and picturesque, nevertheless, fashion photography offers something very different from and much more self conscious than the presentation of clothes in all those photographs that are not fashion photographs. For one thing, fashion photography creates an enclosed, self-sufficient world encapsulated from the past – and that remains true even when it references the past. Inevitably – proposing as it does the right way to look now – it effaces the past, or at least creates a strange disjuncture from it, or else creates a stylistic pastiche of pastness that bears little relation to any actual past. This is consistent, of course, with the present day-ness of our fashion practice. Photographers such as Teller and Day share the concerns of non fashion photographers such as Nan Goldin – and thus with other art forms – in proposing what was once the new aesthetic of the dark, the deviant, the disturbing, a reaction against the formalist notion of timeless beauty; but unlike Nan Goldin they do not capture and memorialise an actual subculture, they simply reference it.

It seems impossible to discuss photography for long without stumbling upon Surrealism. It has been almost universally held against Surrealism that it proved so compatible with fashion, advertising and consumerism. Surrealist photography has been held in high esteem – Susan Sontag, for example, thought that it was the outstanding achievement of the Surrealist movement, although her assessment of the movement as a whole is much more ambivalent than is that of Benjamin. Nevertheless, the relationship of Surrealism, photography, fashion and advertising is paradoxical. On the one hand Surrealist design, surrealist tropes transformed into clichés, were held to be debased by their association with glamour and the way they enhanced the glamour industries; but on the other hand Surrealist photography was the art of memorialising the objet trouvé, the detritus of modern life, or what Freud termed the refuse of the phenomenal world. But it did not necessarily try to transform its images into abstract art in the way that Edward Weston, for example, did.

Surrealism was also fascinated with the outmoded and outdated, with, as Benjamin put it, ‘the dresses of five years ago’.⁸ Now the fashions of five years ago represent – or exist in – a fashion or taste limbo. They are what we have just thrown out, the Kristevan Abject, the garments that don’t look quite right, that seem momentarily to have no style, to be aberrant mistakes. Only years later will their style emerge as something distinctive and of its time; although even then that style essence of ‘the Twenties’ or ‘the Eighties’ will represent only very partially what people actually wore in those decades.

In many ways this means that fashion photography could be less interesting than, say, amateur snapshots, photographic images of fashion in everyday life that memorialise the ephemeral. A fleeting moment is captured on a piece of paper or celluloid, or, today, on a chip. To capture the ephemeral, giving it the permanence of an image, is not exactly the same as to find the eternal in the ephemeral. Snapshots, photo-journalism and news pictures capture people wearing clothes in the situations in which they actually wear them, in the street, at home, at parties, in demonstrations or in crowds at sports events – clothes in use, rather than the presentation of an ideal of fashionable dress which is what fashion photography is. Even the contrast between the fashion pages and the gossip spreads at the back of Vogue or similar magazines – and the celebrities on these pages are normally expensively dressed with an eye to being photographed – presents a telling difference between the ideal and the actual.

I may have seemed to contrast the authenticity of the street-scene or family photo with the artificiality of the fashion shoot. And in a sense I have. Fashion photography is utopian and the contrast is rather poignant between it and the reality of clothes as actually worn. Research into dress relies heavily on the investigation of actual garments. Less attention seems to have been paid to the photographic images – moving as well as still – of our visual records of the past.

Benjamin, Sontag and above all Barthes dwell on the melancholy estrangement of the photograph. ‘The most precise technology,’ writes Benjamin, ‘can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us. No matter how artful the photographer… the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has, so to speak, seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.’⁹

This is not any kind of vulgar (as Sontag would see it) realism. Sontag says that ‘photography’s programme of realism actually implies the belief that reality is hidden… something to be unveiled.’ Photographers aim, she asserts, to ‘catch reality off-guard, in … the “in between moments”.’¹⁰ For her this is in fact again formalism, the de-familiarisation or estrangement of formalism reworked.

This is not the kind of realism or reality discussed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida.¹¹ This book was written shortly after his mother, to whom he was devoted and with whom he lived, had died. It is an act of mourning and dwells on the impossible search for the lost loved one in the photographs of her that survive. At the same time the theme of the book is more or less that searing or reality, the spark of contingency mentioned by Benjamin. Both writers – Sontag too, for all her doubts about photography – write of the magical quality of photographs. They differ from paintings in that what they show us really was. These persons actually lived; these streets did exist. But they are stuck in the past and we cannot reach them. The photograph can never become Alice’s looking glass, which dissolved so that she could move into the alternative world within or behind the glass. As we stare at a photograph we remain locked out of its reality. ‘What renders a photograph surreal,’ writes Sontag, ‘is its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past.’¹²

The persons caught on camera are ghosts from the past, testifying to the relentless passage of time. The clothes they wear as they stare out at us form an integral part of the image and of their ghostliness. The past, out-of-date fashions of which they as often as not seem so proud, contribute to the pathos of these figures. In this way fashion and photography are central to a presentation of the past and of transience. It is essentially their fashionable dress, or dress of its time, that now underlines the transience of these lives. Significantly, a common reaction to such images of the past is mockery. How could we have worn those dreadful clothes! How could they, our forebears have put up with these fashions? How ridiculous they are! This is a form of protective disavowal which seals off the sadness we might otherwise experience at seeing our much younger self with long hair and silly sideburns or with enormous 1980s shoulder pads. This suggests that there is a protective aspect to the fashion cycle. And a brief essay by Sigmund Freud tends to confirm this: On Transience, published during the First World War. In this piece Freud describes a walk in the countryside with two companions on a beautiful summer’s day. One of his companions was a young poet – I believe it was actually Rainer Maria Rilke – who recognised but could not rejoice in the beauty all around. ‘He was disturbed,’ Freud tells us, ‘by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour that men have created or may create … [it was] shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom.’¹³

Freud suggests that this despondency is one of two possible reactions to the thought of the mortality of all things. The other is rebellion and refusal, which is actually a demand for immortality. Freud rejects the possibility of immortality, yet unexpectedly he also rejects the melancholy that we feel when faced with the reality of transience – the melancholy experienced also by Benjamin and Sontag when contemplation of photographs forces them to recognise it. First, Freud argues that just because something beautiful – or everything beautiful – lasts only a short time, that does not lessen its value; on the contrary, it makes it all the more precious. Secondly, the poet’s despondency is a form of mourning for the lost object of desire. Yet mourning spontaneously comes to an end – at least in most cases, although not in the case of Roland Barthes. The mourning process is purposeful and ultimately it frees us from what is lost.

Could it be, then, that the changes that take place in fashion with its continual and recurring incitement to find beauty in the new, represent a beneficial impulse? Far from signifying a trivial and superficial attitude to life and to the world, could it be that fashion’s cycle testifies to resilience and optimism? This is to skate on thin ice, for one could argue that many, indeed most societies did not have a fashion cycle at all in the sense in which we understand it. But clothing rituals have existed in all societies and per haps one should see modernity’s fashion cycle as the ritual of a dynamic and hectically innovative society in adjusting to the force and pace of change and helping us live with it.

Elizabeth Wilson is an author, researcher and pioneer of fashion academia.

Carlotta Manaigo is a fashion photographer, traversing New York and Europe.

This article was originally published in Vestoj On Material Memories.

1. Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Penguin Books, 1977. ↩

2. Walter Benjamin, ‘A Smaill History of Photography’, in One Way Street, London: Verso, 1979, p 241. ↩

3. Sontag, op. cit., p. 90. ↩

4. Benjamin, op. cit., p.255. ↩

5. Sontag, op. cit, p 16. ↩

6. Carol Tulloch, ‘Letter from the Editor’, Fashion Theory, Volume 6, Issue 1, Special Issue on Fashion and Photography, March 2002, p 1. ↩

7. Paul Jobling, ‘On the Turn – Milennial Bodies and the Meaning of Time in Andrea Giacobbe’s Fashion Photography’, in Fashion Theory, op. c.it., pp 3-24. ↩

8. Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, in One Way Street, London: Verso, 1979, p. 29. ↩

9. Benjamin, op. cit., p 243. ↩

10. Sontag, op. cit., p 111. ↩

11. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, London: Vintage, 1993, trans., Richard Howard. ↩

12. Sontag, op.cit., p 54. ↩

13. Sigmund Freud, ‘On Transience’, in Sigmund Freud, Volume 14, Art and Literature, Harmondsworth, Mddx: Penguin Books, pp 287. ↩

Take your pleasure seriously.

Charles Eames

HOW WE UNDERSTAND FASHION is a collection of infinite possibilities, projected images and representations. At once enigmatic, desirable, glamorous, festive, authoritarian; dress is a multi-dimensional concept that might be described and observed a countless number of ways, from anthropological costume to the revered fashion image. More importantly perhaps, fashion occurs in many locations, and simultaneously across the globe. In effect, it does not follow the hierarchical template it aspires to, it instead should be read as a collective, global experience. Our understanding of dress is part of a galaxy of references across time and place: in 1937 Elsa Schiapparelli releases her ‘Shoe Hat’, an exercise in sartorial surrealism, while 4,500 kilometres away, a Nigerian man is photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt walking the street with a shoe atop his head, for reasons unknown. Both images are connected by fashion and but each is inscribed with a myriad of cultural, aesthetic, social characteristics that continue our complex and rich experience of clothing.

In a collaborative series, ‘Sartorial Meditations’, Another Africa‘s Missla Libsekal shares with Vestoj some of her notes on fashion; curating the aesthetic correlations that exist in dress and the fashion image, and reflecting on fashion’s transformative power across the globe. We begin the series with some notes on form, silhouette and its potential for absurdity in this first instalment: ‘In All Seriousness’.

Take the archetypal format of the shoe, both a sartorial adornment and an independent object in space. In shifting the placement from the foot to the head, Schiapparelli’s ‘Shoe Hat’ sought to break the conventions of form and function, this piece has been celebrated as a canonical ‘moment’ in fashion discourse. With similar surreal playfulness, a pair of shoes from the Comme des Garçons autumn/winter 2009 collection, pokes fun at the act of covering the body, by illustrating the hypothetical toes within.

Fashion’s emphasis on ‘balance’ as a design directive and aesthetic value also comes into play here, for the 2013 retrospective of the shoe designer Roger Vivier at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the cover image of the balancing shoe was chosen. The graphic photograph (originally used in an advertising campaign for the brand) reminds us of the physicality of balance as a design principle within the functions of the object. After all, a good heel is an exercise in balance in itself. In keeping with this, Vivier explains his design process, ‘I’ll resketch my drawing five hundred times to check the exactness of the idea and respect the foot’s architecture.’

In contrast, the absurdity and exaggeration of the function of dress is also an aesthetic tool, perpetuating the oft-conceived notion that fashion is a frivolous exercise. A strong image of this is Naomi Campbell’s infamous tumble in walking the catwalk for the Vivienne Westwood spring/summer 1998 collection. The image has since become symbolic of hyperbolic fashion. This is a very physical notion of balance, and under similar principles, the Nigerian man rests his shoe atop his head, reminding us that fashion is, above all, a piece of clothing that can be placed around the body and throughout different contexts.

Fashion’s ability to transform itself and consistently evolve, derives from the notion of breaking codes. When looking at the changing silhouette of the fashioned body through the past, each moment of innovation is the product of defiance from convention, of pushing boundaries. Playing with these ideas forces us to reassess our collective cultural values time again. Warhol’s letter from the Museum of Modern Art in New York brings the notion of absurdity and breaking of convention sharply into focus. His proposal of a shoe as an art piece for the gallery is ridiculous and insightful, as Warhol seems to parody both the fashion and art world in his sartorial offering to the institution.

At times ridiculous, profound, dynamic, these connections and constellations that emerge in examining the form of clothing as ornament of the body, and the fashioned image, encourage a more playful and democratic interpretation of dress, echoing the simple words of Charles Eames, ‘Take your pleasure seriously’.

1. Naomi Campbell takes a tumble during the Vivienne Westwood autumn/winter 1993 catwalk presentation at Paris Fashion week
2. Cover image for the Roger Vivier retrospective exhibition, ‘Virgule, etc… Dans les pas de Roger Vivier’ at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris in 2013
3. Armando Cabral photographed by Richard Pier Petit, with styling by Carl Barnett
4. Hair by Olivier Schawalder for Vogue Pelle
5. ‘Nigerian Man Carrying a Shoe on His Head’ by Alfred Eisenstaedt, April 1953
6. An early example of a stiletto heel, from the International Footwear Museum of Vigevano, Italy c.1952
7. Elsa Schiaparelli, shoe hat 1937/1938 collection.
8. Delman Shoes at Bergdorf Goodman advertisement, designed by Reba Sochis of Sochis Advertising & Promotion, c.1960s
9. ‘Henna vs. Bamako, Mali’ by Glenna Gordon, 2013
10. The rejection letter to Andy Warhol from MoMA in 1956 of his gifted artwork entitled ‘Shoe’, the letter reads:Dear Mr. Warhol:Last week our Committee on the Museum Collections held its first meeting of the fall season and had a chance to study your drawing entitled ‘Shoe’ which you so generously offered as a gift to the Museum.I regret that I must  report to you that the Committee decided, after careful consideration, that they ought not to accept it for our Collection.Let me explain that because of our severely limited gallery and storage space we must turn down many gifts offered, since we feel it is not fair to accept as a gift a work which may be shown only infrequently. Nevertheless, the Committee has asked me to pass on to you their thanks for your generous expression of interest in our Collection.Sincerely,Alfred H. Barr, JrDirector of the Museum Collections P.S. The drawing may be picked up from the Museum at your convenience.
11. Shoes from Comme des Garçons autumn/winter 2009 collection

Missla Libsekal is the founding editor of Another Africa.

To put Mallarmé’s work in context; the mid-nineteenth century was a time when fashion, and images of fashion became a distinctly commercial and desirable commodity. Industrialisation and progress meant that fashion evolved into something multi-faceted, adapting to the Modern era. Dressing for a new contemporary culture became the main prerogative in the production of clothing, and with it came a new set of standards, idiosyncrasies and potential failures. All in all, fashion became a more observable and accessible phenomenon, and as such, a point of fascination for writers and artists alike. Theorists like Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier were, among others, reflective of a burgeoning interest in value of fashion in contemporary culture.

Mallarmé himself was an important figure as a writer and poet in Parisian literature circles of the time, know for his salons which invited readings and performances with fellow poets, writers and intellectuals, setting a context for his own work. His writing and work is largely associated with his involvement with Symbolism, as well as having an important influence on later art styles and movements such as Dadaism, Cubism and Surrealism.

Translated as ‘the latest fashion’, La Dernière Mode first came about on the suggestion from Mallarmé’s friend and neighbour, publisher Charles Wendelen, although the magazine was designed, compiled and executed almost entirely by Mallarmé. The first print run of 3,000, funded entirely by the poet, was largely a labour of love. Working with the illustrator Edmond Morin, the aesthetic of the magazine reflected the mode of the time, largely illustrative and gothic in style and design. The content of the project was a strange mix of fantasy and commercial authenticity, with Mallarmé writing most of the texts under a variety of pseudonyms; including ‘Marguerite de Ponty’ (for fashion, and the theory of fashion); ‘Miss Satin’ (giving news of the fashion houses of Paris); ‘Ix’, a male critic (for theatre and books); ‘Le Chef de bouche chez Brébant (for food), etc.¹ Under these pretenses, he made himself at once both a journalist and fashion designer, simultaneously able to promote the culture of fashion, as well as reflect upon its short-comings, thus creating a sort of myth through which he explored the boundaries of fashion. Behind the façade of the fashion magazine were thinly veiled witticisms and critiques of the culture of dressing. In a passage from the first issue, Mallarmé’s surreal prose is playfully critical:

‘That instinct of beauty, and of relation to climate, which, under each different sky, governs the production of roses, of tulips and carnations: has it nothing to say as regards ear-drops, finger-rings and bracelets? Flowers and jewels: has not each of them, as one might say, its native soil? This sunshine befits that flower, this type of woman that jewel?’

Stéphane Mallarmé, La Dernière Mode

Although La Dernière Mode has come to be regarded as a seminal work in the context of fashion academia, it still remains little known outside of this discourse, but remains an important and unique example of the power of myth-making in literature on commerce and contemporary culture.

1. Furbank, P. N. and Alex Cain. Mallarmé on Fashion. Oxford: Berg, 2004 ↩